'NYPD Blue' ends in a different era for television

Published 6:30 am, Tuesday, March 1, 2005

When the show was a mere two weeks from wrapping forever, he admitted that he had not seen the finished script for the final episode. "They've only had 10 years to come up with it," he wryly remarked.

Well, Franz knows by now, but ABC is keeping the plot of tonight's final episode of the landmark series, created in 1993 by Steven Bochco and David Milch, under wraps. (The network's description of the episode, not available for preview, simply states that Sipowicz "starts a new chapter of his life").

Throughout the years NYPD Blue has represented the essence of television professionalism. The gritty crime drama was so groundbreaking that it's virtually impossible to imagine, in this era of FCC indecency fines, the series debuting today.

Forget wardrobe malfunctions -- in the early years of the series, scenes played out with characters in no wardrobe. Dialogue, particularly that which emanated from Sipowicz's mouth, was raw and real, more like a true front-line cop. Restless camera work and jittery editing contributed to the show's edginess.

Nonetheless, Franz hopes quality should speak for itself. "I would like to think that the show is something more than just risque language or partial nudity," he said. "Those were simply tools that we used very sparingly, particularly in the beginning, but it did capture a lot of attention because of it. A lot of affiliates (in fact, a quarter of ABC's 225 at the time) chose not to air us, but yes, it did end up helping us."

Bochco is not so sanguine. "I don't think today we could sell NYPD Blue in the form that it launched 12 years ago," he said, adding that, at this point, the show is probably not as influential as many credit it to be.

"I had hoped, and I think probably everybody in television had hoped, that NYPD Blue would pave the way for a more open approach to programming, a more adult, 10 o'clock kind of programming. But there's no question that over the course of the last 10 years, the medium has become increasingly conservative."

Tim Brooks, co-author of The Complete Directory to Primetime Network and Cable TV Shows, 1946-Present, noted that the show got away with its adult content thanks to the quality of the context in which it was presented.

"Those infamous brief scenes of nudity were considered quite daring at the time, which seems so long ago," Brooks said. "There was a great deal of angst. It shook up the thinking of what you can do on TV, since the show itself was so well-executed, and those brief flashes of nudity were not exploitive and were, in fact, appropriate to the storytelling."

Bochco remembered, "I always felt that if we survived our first month, that we would be fine. ABC was so anxious about what was going to happen, vis a vis advertisers and affiliates. It was a storm, and if there had been any wobble in the audience reaction to us, I don't know that we would have survived."

"What happened was that people realized that the show wasn't about (nudity)," Brooks continued. "It was about a small group of detectives and the mix of their personal and work lives, about the agonies of the cops themselves. And Andy Sipowicz has endured more agony than anyone. I don't think any character in TV history has endured so much for as long as poor old Sipowicz."

When the series launched, though, Sipowicz gave almost as good as he got. Franz recalled, "I said (at the very beginning), 'Who is going to give a damn about this guy? He's a womanizer, he's a loose cannon, he's a drunk, he's an atheist, he's got everything going against him. Who's going to care whether he lives or dies?' Steven said, 'You'll find a way to make him likable.'

"We just realized that at the core this is probably a good man who just started some wrong turns on a downhill slide and couldn't put the brakes on, and that's when we got introduced to him, at his very lowest. ... He's just a tragic, flawed man, but he's willing to try to understand himself and willing to try to change, if possible. I think that's kind of heroic and wonderful to invest in watching."

Bill Brochtrup's character (precinct receptionist John Irvin) received no end of abuse from Sipowicz early on due to Irvin's homosexuality. "One of the cool things we can do on television is that these stories get told over time. The relationship between these two guys from really not liking each other to becoming friends has taken 10 years, and I think that's the time it takes in real life sometimes for something like that to happen."

"If David had stayed with the show, my guess is it never would have lasted this long," said Bochco, and not just because he feuded long and loudly with the actor. "One of the hallmarks of this show's energy over the course of 12 years is that we were periodically able to reconfigure relationships, emotional entanglements, and it always gave us some fresh perspectives."

Many who meet the irascibly eloquent Milch note that he and Sipowicz had much in common, so when the writer left the series in 1999 (he created CBS' short-lived Big Apple and HBO's current sensation Deadwood), some close observers felt Sipowicz lost his voice.

"Losing Milch was a huge gap the series never managed to recover from," said Ken Tucker, author of Kissing Bill O'Reilly, Roasting Miss Piggy: 100 Things to Love and Hate About TV. "It's obvious from Bochco's recent work that he's no longer at the top of his game. Combine that with the natural weariness that settles over a long-running show and you end up with a sad conclusion to a terrific series.

"The series has taken its great character, Sipowicz, and placed him in these dramatically awkward or unsustainable or repetitive situations. Hooking him up with Charlotte Ross' character was ridiculously unbelievable -- there was never any chemistry, hard as Franz tried to serve the scripts. And instead of continuing the good tradition of pairing Sipowicz with very different sorts of partners (Caruso to Smits to Schroder), they just found another kid-actor/grown-up in Gosselaar in plot lines that went nowhere."

Brooks acknowledged that "'NYPD Blue has a loyal audience, but it's not been a top-10 show for some time, and has been in decline in recent years. Its finale will be less impactful."

Bochco admitted, "It was a show that wasn't performing at a level that (ABC) would've wished it would. It was a very expensive show. And after 12 years, it wasn't as if there was unfinished business."

Nonetheless, until this season, when Desperate Housewives and Lost resuscitated ABC's schedule, NYPD Blue remained its highest-rated drama, and many found the cast changes energizing -- including those who joined the show late.

As Bonnie Somerville, who joined the cast this season as Detective Laura Murphy, said, "(I) just got this and it's over? What a gyp."